What attracted me to Mint were the positive reviews regarding its "ease of use", not necessarily the Mint community (which I haven't yet explored but will as soon as I can ). Those positive experiences have certainly been reflected in that of my own. This is the first Linux distro that I can outright say is fantastic (for my needs) because it works out of the box. Believe me, I've been through several different distros (DSL, Knoppix, Fedora Core, Red Hat, Ubuntu...) in the past three years, and I believe Mint is finally one I can settle with. However, that's not to minimise the contribution those distros have had on the Linux community as a whole, nor to vilify them. They just did not fit my needs (at least when I tried them).

As for my reasons for switching from Ubuntu to Mint, I found that my problem was that I was using my computer mainly as an appliance and was really fed up trying to fix all the media and soft/hardware issues I had experienced (mainly because I am incredibly lazy, even with copying and pasting code ). The mere prospect of switching back to XP after using Linux for 1.5 years as my primary OS made me flinch and shudder (this is getting quite dramatic lol).

Bottom line--Mint honestly is the most polished distro I've used (though to be fair, I've only used a fraction of all the distros out there).

Even though he lives in Ireland, I don't think Clem has any magic faery wands that he can wave to make all these wishes come true right away

I do actually. It just doesn't have any drivers for Linux...

It's true what you said about the forums and the community. There's a great ambiance here. I used to be part of it, to read every single post and to reply to every thread and it was a lot of fun. I remember a lot of names (and npap's more than any other). Of course things have grown out of proportion and I can't afford to do that anymore, I barely spend anytime on the forums nowadays. I miss that.. but more importantly I also lost touch and I don't actually know what's going on here, what people think, what problems they face and what they would like me to do about it. Husse started as a moderator and it helped tremendously. He also spent more time on the forums than anyone else and as Fred pointed out he's making a huge difference in the success of this community and its distribution. He helps, he moderates, he welcomes, and there's all the little things he does... but there's something nobody mentioned: He catches my attention on what's important. He relays important feedback to me. He's there between me and the community listening to everyone out there and making sure I hear what he feels is the most important. This is something I never asked him to do. He just grew into that position and this has become a key role within the team and an essential part of the reason why Mint is still succeeding despite having a larger community. We're still listening, we're still gathering feedback... and it's all mostly thanks to Husse. He's that strong link between the distribution and the community and a very important member of our team.

Mint Rocks! Without Linux-Mint that f*cking XP would still be my OS! At first I only was a "Windows-Refugee", but then I really became a Linux-Mint-Fan, because it's so easy, if you know how you to it!

almigi wrote:Anyone remember the old Apple IIs? Not only could you use AppleSoft BASIC, but if you knew how, you could enter "CALL -151" to enter the system monitor and even write hexadecimal code. Which while not useful for programming from scratch, it meant that those magazines and books full of BASIC programs could include more complex programs that could be entered directly into the computer without the need for an assembler. Of course, once in the system monitor, you could even invoke the built in Apple II miniassembler, which allowed very basic assembly language programming (but no high end features found in commercial assemblers). Do you remember how if you had a modem connected to your computer, even without a terminal program, just entering a few commands at the "]" prompt put you in terminal mode? Granted, it was a dumb terminal with no file xfer features, and you actually had to know how to talk to your modem via AT commands, but it worked! Just "ATDT <bbs phone number>" and whola (assuming there was no busy signal).

I MISS THOSE DAYS!

That all died in the mid 90s. Computers became boring. Yes, some cool games existed and the user interface dramatically improved, but there was still something lacking that was there in the old days.

I could not agree more. I was raised on the openness of the Apple II series of computers and find migration to free software something of a return to form. GNU/Linux distributions seem closest to that experience by bringing so much functionality to the forefront of the operating system, rather than obfuscating (or altogether eliminating) it. Games keep me coming back to Windows once in awhile, but I hope to swear it off for good now.

I have only today begun to use Linux Mint, having used several other distributions over the past few years. I'm very impressed with Mint thus far and I hope to get to know the community, as it appears to be its most touted asset!

almigi wrote:Anyone remember the old Apple IIs? Not only could you use AppleSoft BASIC, but if you knew how, you could enter "CALL -151" to enter the system monitor and even write hexadecimal code. Which while not useful for programming from scratch, it meant that those magazines and books full of BASIC programs could include more complex programs that could be entered directly into the computer without the need for an assembler. Of course, once in the system monitor, you could even invoke the built in Apple II miniassembler, which allowed very basic assembly language programming (but no high end features found in commercial assemblers). Do you remember how if you had a modem connected to your computer, even without a terminal program, just entering a few commands at the "]" prompt put you in terminal mode? Granted, it was a dumb terminal with no file xfer features, and you actually had to know how to talk to your modem via AT commands, but it worked! Just "ATDT <bbs phone number>" and whola (assuming there was no busy signal).

I MISS THOSE DAYS!

That all died in the mid 90s. Computers became boring. Yes, some cool games existed and the user interface dramatically improved, but there was still something lacking that was there in the old days.

I could not agree more. I was raised on the openness of the Apple II series of computers and find migration to free software something of a return to form. GNU/Linux distributions seem closest to that experience by bringing so much functionality to the forefront of the operating system, rather than obfuscating (or altogether eliminating) it. Games keep me coming back to Windows once in awhile, but I hope to swear it off for good now.

I have only today begun to use Linux Mint, having used several other distributions over the past few years. I'm very impressed with Mint thus far and I hope to get to know the community, as it appears to be its most touted asset!

zaq2wsx5tgb wrote:Mint Success is all that was stated and 1) It's Open Source 2) It's a quality project , developed by quality people. 3) A project that builds on a solid foundation 4) Enjoyable to use.

To me this is the best thing about Linux Mint. You can always expect every release to be high quality, and Mint's community is scarcely paralleled. Mint isn't backed by a nice shiny company or anything like that, but somehow every release gets positive reviews. As the person above phrased it: LinuxMINT rocks